I am really not liking getting rid of Warlock's Soul Shatter. That spell was quite useful in groups with an undergeared or fail tank. I guess I am going to have to store gear in my bags more often now. :P

I don't get that randomized order you acquire those perks. At lvl 100 everybody has every perk. Are they trying to force us into playing our class differently or are you just fucked if you get the crapperks at certain points?

For example Fire Mage:
Fire Mage 1 gets 20% dmg bonus for Fireball and Frostfirebolt, thus questing faster, getting along easier.
Fire Mage 2 gets the 1 second reduction to the Infernoblast CD, which doesnt do shit in the beginning.

I don't get that randomized order you acquire those perks. At lvl 100 everybody has every perk. Are they trying to force us into playing our class differently or are you just fucked if you get the crapperks at certain points?

For example Fire Mage:
Fire Mage 1 gets 20% dmg bonus for Fireball and Frostfirebolt, thus questing faster, getting along easier.
Fire Mage 2 gets the 1 second reduction to the Infernoblast CD, which doesnt do shit in the beginning.

That's what I was thinking! - Also, If you get them all once you hit 100, surely the randomness is naught? I would understand if it was something fun but if its base damage etc, how's that exciting?

To me it sounds like someone had the idea of these perks, said people get them randomly based on their play style and its super fun, but then the "Balance wagon" hit them in the balls.

"Enhanced Premeditation - Premeditation is no longer an active ability. Instead your Garrote and Ambush always generate 2 additional combo points when used from Stealth"
Well that sucks major donkey balls.

So, they gutted the really fun talent tree system and justified it by saying that most of the talents were mandatory boring old "Plus 5% damage/healing to X spell" stuff...

And now, their 'perks' system is basically the same thing, only we don't get to actually 'choose' what perks we get, Blizz just hands them to us at each level.

Goddamn, they're seriously dumbing this game down to painful levels.

No, aside from tweak perks, I'm really loving some of these and they're a far cry from 'boring + or -'. Hell, a good example is frost getting an entirely new ability added to the water elemental. Or survival's perma camouflage.

I will say, to be fair they're mostly just what we would normally get by leveling a class to the new level cap in an expansion, but most of them are amazing.

And please people, stop 'complaining' that this expansion is a glorified patch because of this....because THAT'S WHAT YOU'RE LOOKING AT. These are the patch notes(you know, the one that we'll get before the expac actually launches, like all the other expacs). At least wait until we truly see beta to start saying it...(and no, I'm not of the 'bliz will fix it' crowd, I just think it's asanine to complain about a patch being evidence ab expansion will just be a 'patch')

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Originally Posted by cptaylor38

Ageed. It might as well translate into, "Reach level 100 and you receive a 20% bonus increase to all of your major abilities!"

And then a few random ability changes here and there that look like they were meant to be glyphs at some point.

It's not like they could have really done a whole lot with the perks, and this is pretty much what I was expecting, but it's still pretty underwhelming.

But isn't that what people said about glyphs in the first place? "Aren't these just talents that blizz held back?" Personally, I agree with the notion, though most seem more like cool spec specific passives you'd get from leveling rather than glyphs, like nuke immolate or slice and dice always on. I just think its not anything to fret over, since its what people should have been expecting, what with us no longer getting new moves like candy(as in previous expacs) because of ability bloat and pruning.

was really hoping the would do away with that dumb holy power/combo bar on the pallys. I miss my pally of old

I've gotta respectfully disagree here. I played a pally before and after they introduced holy power, and I've got to say that I like the added complexity and interesting gameplay it added. Previously, healing felt like any other healer, which was fine but there wasn't much to it besides being awesome single target healing. In Wrath, with decent gear, mana was never a real concern in anything but the highest of play modes, so it didn't even feel like we had a resource to mind or manage. Ret was even worse; I don't think I have ever seen a ret pally come even remotely close to running out of mana, so all the class was was a rotation (or priority list, however you want to look at it) with no interesting gameplay.

I don't think the holy power system took anything away from us, but it added a level of depth that made playing the class more interesting. Since they added new HP abilities instead of locking existing ones behind the system, it felt like a pure bonus to manage holy power and use powerful new abilities with it. Does it feel a little too close to combo points? Sure, and I'm sure they could have developed something a little bit more unique to the class, but at the core, the paladin was just boring with only mana as a resource, and not even a compelling or even really noticeable one at that.

To the article at hand, I'm really glad that they're making our existing core abilities feel more powerful instead of adding more buttons for us to press and squeeze into already tight bars. It does feel a bit lime the old +% talents that they shyed away from, but the numbers are significant enough to enforce the idea that these are the abilities core to your class and spec, these are the heavy hitters you will be known for.

And I'm reaaally glad they added bonus damage in execute range to Malefic Grasp, as that was my biggest concern with the removal of Drain Soul. (Though I am concerned about impact on levelling speed; finishing off an enemy by draining their soul and refilling your shards was how a lock can be at full effectiveness from target to target pretty much indefinitely, and I don't know if 5% more profs on nightfall is enough to make up for that).

I don't get that randomized order you acquire those perks. At lvl 100 everybody has every perk. Are they trying to force us into playing our class differently or are you just fucked if you get the crapperks at certain points?

For example Fire Mage:
Fire Mage 1 gets 20% dmg bonus for Fireball and Frostfirebolt, thus questing faster, getting along easier.
Fire Mage 2 gets the 1 second reduction to the Infernoblast CD, which doesnt do shit in the beginning.

I don't get this... I understand we get all of the perks at 100, but are they all active, or is it like D3's rune system (as mentioned earlier) where we have to choose which ones we use?

If it's the latter, I like the implementation. If it's the former, this sounds completely idiotic. As stated before, they might as well just have all of our stuff do 20% more damage at 100, or just have all of our stuff scale as we level instead of making a big deal about it. "Your X spell hits Y harder!" Can we have it come up every time we equip a new piece of gear too?

It's both hilarious and infuriating seeing people getting really excited about these "Draenor Perks" like it's new content to justify buying the expansion.

All this stuff essentially amounts to additional percentages and values that you'd usually just get for levelling up anyway, OR just necessary balance/ability tweaks that you'd get in a normal patch; but dressed up and presented in a format which appears to be a new "feature".

Blizzard have recognised that Warlords of Draenor (and its associate patch) feels like an "unexpansion" - removing content in the name of simplicity/fixing - so they've created these "Draenor Perks" which you can only get after level 90, just to make you feel as though you're getting new hero stuff/abilities as a direct result of buying the expansion.

I'm not saying don't be happy about balance changes, and I'm not saying don't look forward to new zones, garrisons and new race models. All I'm saying is don't be fooled into thinking that "Draenor Perks" counts as new content or a feature. They're just relocated patch notes; a balanced end-game split up into fragments and incrementally spoon-fed to you slightly earlier in a snazzy way. It is blatant manipulation of the customer.

So I am having a hard time with these notes...I personally main a rogue and I found the buffs to our abilities to be nice but the removal of our spells...it has me wondering what reasoning was it to remove those. First off Disarm Trap, granted it's an ability nobody uses in current content but I had hoped that Blizzard would add some form of mechanic in the new raids where rogues would once again be able to disarm traps and such for the raids just like they once did in Blackwing Lair.

Now moving onto the next ability, Rupture being removed from Combat, now I see the idea behind this because combat is more of a dueling/hard hitting class that really isn't based off of dots for increased dps so I am not happy about it being removed but it's not a total deal breaker.

Now for the last ability, Shadow Blades, from what I understand Blizzard said they wanted to get rid of spells and abilities that were practically useless in there respective classes, so then why remove Shadow Blades?...which is a rogue's major damage CD, our really only CD, especially for combat, now Assassination has Vendetta which I can see is good in itself, Subtlety has Shadow Dance, Combat has Killing spree which in most situations isn't viable mainly for it's positioning purposes. Quite frankly I am greatly upset with the removal of Shadow Blades, yes this is a form of rant and I know other classes got gimped pretty hard but I am seriously just not seeing why they wouldn't get rid of other useless abilities such as Tricks of the Trade or Redirect instead? Well I guess there is still a good while where new patch notes will be released and maybe this issue will be addressed.

this is only something that is supposed to make levelling somewhat more progressive, not supposed to make every class super fun so stop complaining about x% increases, most of us are getting at least one utility tweak or durations can also alter your playstyle quite a bit.

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Originally Posted by KotaValentine

So I am having a hard time with these notes...I personally main a rogue and I found the buffs to our abilities to be nice but the removal of our spells...it has me wondering what reasoning was it to remove those. First off Disarm Trap, granted it's an ability nobody uses in current content but I had hoped that Blizzard would add some form of mechanic in the new raids where rogues would once again be able to disarm traps and such for the raids just like they once did in Blackwing Lair.

Now moving onto the next ability, Rupture being removed from Combat, now I see the idea behind this because combat is more of a dueling/hard hitting class that really isn't based off of dots for increased dps so I am not happy about it being removed but it's not a total deal breaker.

Now for the last ability, Shadow Blades, from what I understand Blizzard said they wanted to get rid of spells and abilities that were practically useless in there respective classes, so then why remove Shadow Blades?...which is a rogue's major damage CD, our really only CD, especially for combat, now Assassination has Vendetta which I can see is good in itself, Subtlety has Shadow Dance, Combat has Killing spree which in most situations isn't viable mainly for it's positioning purposes. Quite frankly I am greatly upset with the removal of Shadow Blades, yes this is a form of rant and I know other classes got gimped pretty hard but I am seriously just not seeing why they wouldn't get rid of other useless abilities such as Tricks of the Trade or Redirect instead? Well I guess there is still a good while where new patch notes will be released and maybe this issue will be addressed.

not sure why you rant when you obviously don't play a rogue....a rogue would know how useful tricks of the trade is.

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Originally Posted by jammmo

It's both hilarious and infuriating seeing people getting really excited about these "Draenor Perks" like it's new content to justify buying the expansion.

All this stuff essentially amounts to additional percentages and values that you'd usually just get for levelling up anyway, OR just necessary balance/ability tweaks that you'd get in a normal patch; but dressed up and presented in a format which appears to be a new "feature".

Blizzard have recognised that Warlords of Draenor (and its associate patch) feels like an "unexpansion" - removing content in the name of simplicity/fixing - so they've created these "Draenor Perks" which you can only get after level 90, just to make you feel as though you're getting new hero stuff/abilities as a direct result of buying the expansion.

I'm not saying don't be happy about balance changes, and I'm not saying don't look forward to new zones, garrisons and new race models. All I'm saying is don't be fooled into thinking that "Draenor Perks" counts as new content or a feature. They're just relocated patch notes; a balanced end-game split up into fragments and incrementally spoon-fed to you slightly earlier in a snazzy way. It is blatant manipulation of the customer.

Rant over.

Blizzard has stated that it is just a way to feel like you are progressing ahead when levelling up rather than going backwards, like earlier expansions, remember going from 85 - 86, your dps was lower due to gear being less effective for your current level, by 88 it was quite horrible, as the DS epics were comparable to the questing greens/dungeon blues so you stood there with the same ratings and int lvls as you had 3 levels before it, but the dps was like 2/3 or less. Which is what they are trying to fix, and frankly they are doing a good job, but you are right in the statement that it isn't new content.
Also it is not giving at an earlier stage than usual, it's given at a later stage, usually you have all passives before previous expansions max lvl, in this case you don't have all until you are max lvl.
And no you are stupid to belive it's manipulation, if people are stupid enough to make up their own ideas that it is extra content over a fix to a current issue , then it's not blizzard's fault.

TL;DR this is just a fix to progressing while levelling problem, nothing big, but still needed.